Critics to Gnosticism (3)
Princesa SophiaPAGES:
"You will be like God":
The serpent also tells Eve:
"For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil"
— Genesis 3:5.
This statement requires careful interpretation.
The text does not say that Adam and Eve acquired divine powers, immortality, omniscience, omnipotence, or any other ordinary attribute associated with God.
Immediately after eating the fruit, the narrative describes their eyes being opened:
"Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked."
— Genesis 3:7
The text therefore gives us a concrete indication of what changed: their awareness of their own condition.
It does not describe them suddenly acquiring supernatural powers, that they became creators, that they acquired control over nature, that they became immortal, that they acquired omniscience and it does not even say that they became equal to God.
The expression "like God, knowing good and evil" should therefore not automatically be interpreted as humanity acquiring the divine status attributed to God.
One possible interpretation is that humanity acquired an experiential or moral awareness of good and evil that it did not previously possess.
This is consistent with what immediately follows: shame, fear, hiding, judgment, and alienation.
Humanity did not suddenly become "godlike".
There is another problem with interpreting the serpent's promise as humanity receiving previously inaccessible divine powers.
The biblical text does not indicate that Adam and Eve possessed fundamentally inferior spiritual capacities before eating the fruit and then suddenly became "like gods" afterward.
Before the Fall, Adam already communicates directly with God.
He understands divine commands, names animals, understands language, recognizes Eve as corresponding to himself, possesses moral responsibility and is capable of making choices.
Nothing in Genesis explicitly states that Adam and Eve lacked extraordinary spiritual capacities and acquired them through the fruit.
Consequently, the serpent lied when it said "you will be like God" if the serpent meant:
"You will acquire the supernatural capabilities possessed by the gods".
Only if one interprets as specifically qualified by the words that follow:
"knowing good and evil".
The comparison is therefore about a particular kind of knowledge, not an acquisition of divine omnipotence.
The irony of the serpent's promise:
There is also an important literary feature of the narrative.
The serpent promises:
"your eyes will be opened"
and Adam and Eve's eyes are indeed opened.
But what do they discover?
They discover their nakedness, experience shame, hide from God, experience alienation and eventually experience death.
This creates a significant distinction between partial truth and truthful interpretation.
A deceptive statement does not need to contain an entirely false proposition.
A deceiver can tell the truth about one consequence while concealing the consequences that actually matter.
The serpent can therefore be understood as having accurately predicted that their perception would change while still misleading them about what that change would mean.
This is one reason why I do not consider the mere fact that Adam and Eve's eyes were "opened" to be evidence that the serpent was a benevolent revealer of truth.
Knowledge itself was not the problem.
This interpretation also requires an important distinction.
The biblical narrative does not portray knowledge as inherently evil.
The Bible repeatedly praises wisdom and understanding.
"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom" — Proverbs 9:10.
And:
"Get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding" — Proverbs 4:7.
Therefore, the Christian interpretation does not need to claim that God prohibited knowledge because knowledge itself is dangerous.
The problem in Genesis is more specific.
God prohibits eating from a particular tree.
Humanity violates that command.
The resulting problem is therefore not simply:
"Humanity learned something".
It is:
"Humanity disobeyed God in order to obtain something that God had prohibited".
This distinction is particularly important when responding to the interpretation of the serpent as a liberator.
If knowledge itself were the thing God opposed, the biblical portrayal of wisdom throughout the rest of Scripture would become difficult to explain.
But if the problem is rebellious acquisition of knowledge and moral autonomy, the broader biblical picture becomes much more coherent.
Some interpretations associate the serpent with Lilith or interpret the forbidden fruit as a sexual or sinful substance rather than an entheogen.
This produces a substantially different interpretation and therefore should be distinguished from the entheogenic interpretation.
I would also avoid arguing that intimate desire itself first appeared after the Fall.
Genesis 2 already presents Adam and Eve as husband and wife:
"That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh" — Genesis 2:24.
Furthermore, the preceding chapter explicitly commands humanity:
"Be fruitful and increase in number" — Genesis 1:28.
Therefore, intimacy and reproduction cannot simply be treated as consequences introduced by the serpent.
What Genesis 3 explicitly introduces is, in my opinion, lust:
"They realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves"
— Genesis 3:7.
The distinction is important.
What changes is humanity's relationship to its own bodily condition.
Consequently, I find it more accurate to speak of shame, disordered desire, vulnerability, and the consequences of sin rather than claiming that sexual desire itself suddenly appeared after eating the fruit.
This would contradict the idea of the serpent offering a "god making fruit", since there is no result from that we can consider "godly", neither anything special happened, it just introduced sin into the world.
The serpent as Christ:
The identification of the Edenic serpent with Christ presents an even greater difficulty from a Christian perspective.
The New Testament consistently presents Christ as the one through whom humanity is reconciled to God, not as the one who reveals that God himself is an evil creator.
Jesus repeatedly appeals to the Hebrew Scriptures as authoritative and does not present their God as an impostor.
As already discussed:
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them"
— Matthew 5:17.
Furthermore, the New Testament explicitly connects Christ with creation:
"Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made"
— John 1:3.
And:
"For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible"
— Colossians 1:16.
This creates a major theological incompatibility with the interpretation that Christ was secretly the serpent liberating humanity from an evil creator.
The New Testament does not present Christ as an opponent of the Creator.
It presents Christ as intimately united with the Creator and as the agent through whom creation itself is ultimately reconciled.
The serpent and the Christian understanding of deception:
The later biblical tradition also consistently associates the serpent with deception rather than with salvific revelation.
The imagery reaches an explicit culmination in Revelation:
"That ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray"
— Revelation 12:9.
And again:
"The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray"
— Revelation 20:2.
This does not by itself settle every historical question concerning how the serpent was understood at every stage of Jewish tradition. Genesis itself does not explicitly call the serpent "Satan".
However, within the canonical Christian narrative, the serpent ultimately becomes incorporated into the broader identification of Satan as the deceiver.
Therefore, the canonical trajectory moves in the opposite direction from the Gnostic interpretation:
serpent → deception → Satanic imagery
rather than:
serpent → revelation → Christ.
In short:
If the serpent is interpreted as a benevolent entity whose purpose was to liberate humanity through an entheogenic fruit, then several difficulties arise.
The fruit does not lead directly to immortality.
The biblical narrative associates the Fall with sin and death.
The promised "likeness to God" is not described as the acquisition of divine powers, but specifically in connection with knowledge of good and evil.
Humanity already possessed substantial intellectual and spiritual capacities before eating the fruit.
Knowledge itself is not portrayed throughout Scripture as evil.
The only result from the fruit that is identifiable in the bible is the introduction to lust, sin and death.
And the later Christian identification of the serpent with the adversarial figure of Satan is fundamentally incompatible with identifying the serpent as Christ.
For these reasons, I do not find the interpretation of the Edenic serpent as a benevolent liberator convincing within the biblical framework.
The more coherent reading, in my view, is that the serpent offered humanity something that APPEARED desirable and intellectually liberating while concealing its destructive consequences. The resulting knowledge was merely an introduction to sin, but the interpretation that this knowledge constituted salvation does not follow from the text.
The biblical narrative does not condemn humanity for becoming intelligent.
It depicts humanity as attempting to obtain moral autonomy apart from God and suffering the consequences of that decision.
LIFE IS BAD AND ANTI-NATALISM:
JESUS AS A MERE SPIRITUAL BEING (NOT HUMAN):
JESUS AS A MERE PROPHET:
- Which is also a Islamic point-of-view.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_(gnostic)